The Interlanguage of Persian Learners of Italian: a Focus on Complex Predicates

This paper aims at investigating the acquisition of Italian complex predicates by native speakers of Persian. Complex predication is not as pervasive a phenomenon in Italian as it is in Persian. Yet Italian native speakers use complex predicates productively; spontaneous data show that Persian learners of Italian seem to be perfectly aware of Italian complex predicates and use this familiar feature as a bridge between their native language (NL) and the target language (TL). Elicitation of complex predicates in guided context seems to indicate that the Persian group learners’ group is strikingly uniform to the Native Speakers’ group and quite homogeneous with the control group of learners with NL other than Persian. This research shows that the use of complex predicates in Italian Interlanguage (IL) cannot be considered a simple effect of transfer, but could be also analyzed as a more general IL strategy.